Johanne Devlin Trew’s
recent
book on migration from Northern Ireland is that increasingly rare thing
in Irish diaspora studies: research that addresses a genuinely glaring gap in the literature. As she
points out, there has been a relative silence with regard to migration and diaspora
in relation to
Northern Ireland on the part of both policy
-
makers and academics.
The neglect of the ‘Northern
diaspora’ on the political stage
since the outbreak of the Troubles
ma
y be considered
understandable,
and Trew goes into some details as to the l
ikely political motivations involve
d.
T
he
academic neglect of the topic is rather harder to fathom. Trew attributes this
to
compartmentalisation in social scientific research on the North,
and a ‘partitionist’ approach in the
study of 20
th
century Irish mi
gration (p.6). She argues that the complications
arising from dealing
with data from two national jurisdictions has led to a concentration in the literature on migration
from the Republic, with the consequence that authorities in the North could label emig
ration as ‘a
Southern problem’, and that pre
-
1922 Irish migration is now wrongly seen through a partitionist
lens.